Contents

Availability

The source code for this module currently lives on Eric's phyloxml branch in GitHub. If you're interested in testing this code before it's been merged into Biopython, follow the instructions there to create your own fork, or just clone the phyloxml branch onto your machine.

The I/O and tree-manipulation functionality will work without them; they're imported on demand when the functions to_networkx() and draw_graphviz() are called.

The XML parser used in the IO.PhyloXMLIO sub-module is ElementTree, added to the Python standard library in Python 2.5. To use this module in Python 2.4, you'll need to install a separate package that provides the ElementTree interface. Two exist:

PhyloXMLIO attempts to import each of these compatible ElementTree implementations until it succeeds. The given XML file handle is then parsed incrementally to instantiate an object hierarchy containing the relevant phylogenetic information.

I/O functions

Wrappers for supported file formats are available from the top level of the module:

from Bio import Phylo

Like SeqIO and AlignIO, this module provides four I/O functions: parse(), read(), write() and convert(). Each function accepts either a file name or an open file handle, so data can be also loaded from compressed files, StringIO objects, and so on. If the file name is passed as a string, the file is automatically closed when the function finishes; otherwise, you're responsible for closing the handle yourself.

The second argument to each function is the target format. Currently, the following formats are supported:

example from Prof. Joe Felsenstein's book "Inferring Phylogenies"
example from Prof. Joe Felsenstein's book "Inferring Phylogenies"
same example, with support of type "bootstrap"
same example, with species and sequence
same example, with gene duplication information and sequence relationships
similar example, with more detailed sequence data
network, node B is connected to TWO nodes: AB and C
...

If there's only one tree, then the next() method on the resulting generator will return it.

Note that this doesn't immediately reveal whether there are any remaining trees -- if you want to verify that, use read() instead.

read()

Parse and return exactly one tree from the given file or handle. If the file contains zero or multiple trees, a ValueError is raised. This is useful if you know a file contains just one tree, to load that tree object directly rather than through parse() and next(), and as a safety check to ensure the input file does in fact contain exactly one phylogenetic tree at the top level.

tree = Phylo.read('example.xml', 'phyloxml')print tree

write()

Write a sequence of Tree objects to the given file or handle. Passing a single Tree object instead of a list or iterable will also work. (See, TreeIO is friendly.)

convert()

Given two files (or handles) and two formats, both supported by Bio.Phylo, convert the first file from the first format to the second format, writing the output to the second file.

Phylo.convert('example.nhx', 'newick', 'example2.nex', 'nexus')

Tree and Subtree classes

The basic objects are defined in Bio.Phylo.BaseTree.

Format-specific extensions

To support additional information stored in specific file formats, sub-modules within Tree offer additional classes that inherit from BaseTree classes.

Each sub-class of BaseTree.Tree or Node has a class method to promote an object from the basic type to the format-specific one. These sub-class objects can generally be treated as instances of the basic type without any explicit conversion.

PhyloXML:
Support for the phyloXML format. See the PhyloXML page for details.

Newick:
The Newick module provides minor enhancements to the BaseTree classes, plus several shims for compatibility with the existing Bio.Nexus module. The API for this module is under development and should not be relied on, other than the functionality already provided by BaseTree.

Utilities

Some additional tools are located in the Utils module under Bio.Phylo. These functions are also loaded to the top level of the Phylo module on import for easy access.

Where a third-party package is required, that package is imported when the function itself is called, so these dependencies are not necessary to install or use the rest of the Tree module.

pretty_print()

Produces a plain-text representation of the entire tree. Uses str() to display nodes by default; for the longer repr() representation, add the argument show_all=True.

Graph export

Although any phylogenetic tree can reasonably be represented by a directed acyclic graph, the Phylo module does not attempt to provide a generally usable graph library. Instead, it provides two functions for exporting Tree objects to the excellent NetworkX library's graph objects and using that library, along with matplotlib and/or PyGraphviz, to display trees.

to_networkx returns the given tree as a networkx LabeledDiGraph or LabeledGraph object. You'll probably need to import networkx directly for subsequent operations on the graph object. To display a (somewhat haphazard-looking) dendrogram on the screen, for interactive work, use matplotlib or pylab along with one of networkx's drawing functions.

draw_graphviz mimics the networkx function of the same name, with some tweaks to improve the display of the graph. If a file name is given, the graph is drawn directly to that file, and options such as image format (default PDF) may be used.